20 February 2016 Cbr100 Training Gold Creek to Watson

Resting our weary bones | photo Jaime Lapus

Saturday 20 February: Cbr100 Training – L/E. From Gold Creek Village via the northern Canberra Centenary Trail, Mulligans Flat and Goorooyarroo Nature Reserves to the Federal Highway. Flank Mt Majura to the east, then over Mt Ainslie to the War Memorial. Around 50km and 1200m climb. For quick walkers. Do as much or as little as you like provided you arrange your pickup. Maps: Canberra and Hall. Leader: John Evans, 0417 436 877, john@johnevans.id.au. Transport: Please drive yourself. Please book.

3 of us met outside the George Harcourt Inn in Gold Creek.

Summary

Distance: 39.3km | Climb: 770m | Time: 7.30am-3.25pm (7hrs 55mins), including 32 mins of breaks | Grading: L/E; M(11+)

Photographs

Photographs are available, where you can start a large sized slideshow.

Waypoint and Track Files

Download the .gpx file. (Right click, Save Link As…, Save – if you want to use it.)
To use in Google Earth, do File, Open… and select Gps or All files as the File Type.

Track Notes

This time last year, 2 weeks before the 2015 Cbr100Challenge, I did 70km. Today we did 40km. That shows the state of my preparation and training 😥 . I’ll need every minute of the 29 hours time limit in 2 weeks time.

Anyway, a nice walk with great friends. A few lessons.

We kept the moving average above 5km/hr to morning tea, covering 15.9km in 2hrs 55mins. A 12 minute break. The rock sculptures are growing in size and increasing in number. Wonderful!

There’s a hole in the side of the track (wretched wombats 😆 ) on the eastern flank of One Tree Hill. Wouldn’t like a foot to go in that in the dark during the event.

Morning tea to lunch saw us having a couple of trots down beside Duke Rd, then tromping the fairly featureless Mulligans Flat NR (no insult meant, it’s featureless if you’re just focussed on transitting it). 20 minute lunch stop at the border between Mulligans Flat Nature Reserve and Goorooyarroo Nature Reserve. At lunch, we’d covered 26.6km in 4hrs 55mins, so still had an overall average speed of 5.4km/hr.

Goorooyarroo Nature Reserve is the same as Mulligans Flat. The gravel management trail can be hard on one’s feet, and walking on the looser gravel of the middle or on the edge of the road is better. My feet were ok today, thanks to using Hikers’ Wool (thanks CC!). I have some ball of the feet anti-blister pads on order for the day.

We crossed Horse Park Drive and wound along the permanent temporary detour of the CCT near the Federal Highway-Horse Park Drive intersection and crossed under the Federal Highway. Heading towards Mt Majura, Jacqui left us to walk to her home. At this point we’d covered 34.1km in 6hrs 35mins elapsed, giving us an overall average speed of 5.3km/hr.

From here, things went a little pear shaped. I missed the turn off the management trail to take us up and across the northern flank of Mt Majura, so we had to back track a couple of hundred metres. The actual point on the current Cbr100Challenge 100km gpx file doesn’t make much sense (I’d guess the turn off is under the powerlines, where we later came down).

Silly old codger. I now realise that this bit of the route is up the Majura stone wall, then a turn up the hill to the top of the knoll where the tree house used to be.

We sidled towards the gpx track I had on my GPSr and picked up a footpad. A bit of a climb and it was hot (29ºC at this time). We sat down for a drink, to discover that one of us had run out of water and when we shared the stock I deemed there was not enough to get us around Majura, through the Majura/Ainslie saddle and up and over Ainslie to the finish line. So I pulled the plug and we retreated down to the management trail on the west side of Majura. BTW, I hope the organisers mark this bit well – I’ll be through here again around 3am on 6 March.

We wandered along the west side of Majura, down to Antill St, found a greenway down through Watson and pulled in for a cold coke at the shops.

Jaime’s wife picked us up and took me back to my car.

Thanks heaps for your company Jacqui and Jaime.